Halfway through my first viewing of Cloud Atlas, I knew I had to watch it again. When I finished, I debated. Commercial compromise is much harder for me to take than lack of ambition. Cloud Atlas sold out. I make that statement now after two full viewings. I greatly admire and respect what the film initially set out to do. This is a film with a numerous characters, lesser actors, several events, plenty of scenes and a lot to chew on. They’re all pieced together into a beautiful collage, as if it were the grandest editing project by a film scholar of the highest rank. Nevertheless, the film bears it all evenly. The tone wavers, but never falters.
Cloud Atlas is a
large web of narratives, switching back and forth between its sub-plots, each
telling a story from a different era and each just as interesting as the other.
The film’s talky and quite objectively defined; clearly a film with an agenda.
There’s no attempt to suck you in, not an ounce of realism. This is a cinematic
achievement that you are meant to experience from the outside. But the
perspective is sky-high and the approach is ground-breaking. It requires real audacity
to do what Cloud Atlas intends to do and even more to do it the way the film-makers
do it.
